


victrix

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Boy Kingship, Gore, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 06:01:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hell is not without its perks. The boy king's hired a new chauffeur.</p>
            </blockquote>





	victrix

**I.**

_Where do we start?_ he says.

The boy is quiet. He’s looking out at the sea and the sky turning red above it for miles and miles and miles. The clouds torn up and the cold sun and the reflection of the atmosphere staining the water. How it seethes and hisses and falters like blood.

_How much of this is mine?_ the little red king says in reply, picking at his lip with his index fingernail. _How am I supposed to choose where to begin?_

_Baby,_ he says, _the whole damn world is yours._

* * *

 

**II.**

Word comes on the hot winds that there are armies gathering in the West. They want him. Up here, topside, where many of them have never been before, everything is new and strange and solid. They’re fidgety. They need a leader. They’re crawling into hosts with black feet and black eyes, they’re sharpening their teeth, they’re shaking out the cobwebs and they’re itching for him.

The little red king has a brother out there. He’s got a crown he doesn’t wear and a host of angels to bring down and—best of all—he’s got a ride.

War volunteered; War stepped up the moment he heard that the children who’d cut his fingers off had given in. War has found that the little red king makes him laugh in a way no country, no government, no huddled human encampment in the wilderness ever wants to hear him laugh. He’s not ashamed to admit the boy _inspires_ him. The child king’s blood runs hot and black in him and now that he is here, where he is meant to be—standing on the edge of America, looking back, ready to light it all on fire, full of that righteous, angry, complicated furor—now that he is here War is finally breathing free. He’s _invigorated._ He wants to mold this boy. He wants to be the quake pushing up through the child’s tectonic plates that brings the magma to the surface. Make him his project, his microcosm, his Petri dish. When he thinks of all the destruction, the crumbling cities, the bloody streets he can engender here in him, when he thinks of all the conflict and the hate, why, it’s enough to make him giddy. War smiles a lot these days.

And the king likes him. The king feels their kinship, he thinks.

War is happy—ecstatic, even—to take him anywhere he’d like to go.

* * *

 

**III.**

_I need to learn,_ says the little red king, as they are tearing silently through the black backroads, south along the Eastern coast. The Mustang knows when it needs to afford them quiet. She’s a good animal, this car; keeps her growling to a minimum when they want to pass soundlessly through the world. He looks at War, and War thinks his eyes might be glowing a little in the dark. _I need to know what it is, exactly, that I can do._

War shrugs. _Nothing you_ can’t _do. You’re the king._

_Do I need blood?_ the king asks, and War smirks; _of course,_ he responds, _you want enough blood that you can bathe in it._

_Demon?_

_Doesn’t matter,_ says War. _If it spills for you it’s power._

_It’s that easy,_ the boy says, mostly to himself. _It’s that easy, if I’m king?_

_You’re starting to get it now,_ says War.

* * *

 

**IV.**

_Try this,_ he says.

_What you want,_ he says, holding the passenger door for the king in the wet, muddy, unpaved parking lot of the roadhouse, one streetlamp to its name, the sky pissing rain, neon signs flickering feebly like a beacon to the night, Harleys leaning outside the door, _what you want is destruction. You want chaos. Chaos is energy and blood is power and once you learn to breathe it like me—_

The little red king looks at the squat square building. He looks a little lost. Or perhaps—not so much lost as uncertain, clenching and unclenching his fist. He’s still too human yet, still too gentle.

— _then,_ War says, _then you’ll know how to tear down that horizon with your little finger._

The boy looks at him and War thinks it’ll be a long road with this one. He needs to be broken. Pinched and pushed and frustrated until he knows what he wants to accomplish and knows how to go after it. War knows he’s got it in him to bring Heaven crashing down around their ears, to pave the way for the Devil, to make himself ready like a cathedral for the End of Days. He knows he’s got the rage, the bitterness, the betrayal. Knows he’ll exceed expectations, even, once he’s reunited with his brother in the West—oh, that was a surprise, that turn, that last gasp and surrender to the king’s cause, and it was a delicious achievement—knows this boy is the one to lead them to their triumph.

He just has to be patient.

_Try this,_ he says, and leads the way.

They don’t fit in amongst the leather and the denim. They’re not exactly dressed for whiskey in the wilderness. War’s suit, grey and always pressed, and the little red king’s fitted jacket and crimson pocket handkerchief, the gold pin on his lapel—their tallness, their inherent venom—eyes and heads turn as soon as the door opens under War’s hand. Frowns. Fear, inexplicable and unnameable. War breathes it in like incense. He hopes the child is doing the same.

The dregs of these backwoods make room for them at the bar as if they know, somehow.

_What now?_ the little red king asks, unbuttoning his jacket the way a good businessman would, sitting straight-backed on the stool. War leans onto the bar, watching the woman at the tap fidget and avert her eyes.

_What do you think?_ The woman drifts towards them, looking like a scared animal, and pours two glasses of whiskey for them without being asked, as if she knows she is in danger and this can save her, somehow. War smiles at her, quite genially. Doesn’t bother to lower his voice when he continues, _kill ‘em all._

_Why?_ And there’s the problem—the wrinkle he’ll have to smoothe out before too long.

He shrugs. _Because you can,_ he says. _Because no one can stop you._

_They haven’t done anything,_ says the little red king.

_Haven’t they?_ says War, lifting his glass with his three-fingered hand. _Look at them._ The king looks. _These are the people who hated you when you were young without knowing who you were. These are the rats, the dogs, the fleas on the back of the world who always looked down on you. Never gave you a chance. Called you_ freak. _Called you_ dirty. _Didn’t care that you were destined for great things. Didn’t believe that you could bring the universe to its knees. Doubted you, spat on you, violated and bullied you, and now’s your chance, baby,_ as he swallows his whiskey in one, _now’s your chance to watch them rip each other apart the way they ripped you apart once._

_But it wasn’t_ these _people,_ the king protests, though his voice is weak and War can see the fire behind his eyes. _I don’t know these people._

_At the end of the day,_ says War, _they’re all the same inferior species. They pushed you to where you are. Push ‘em back._

War remembers River Pass. Remembers the look on the child’s face when he’d said, _Frankly, you’re really vicious little animals, Sam; you’re my poster boy; blood, blood, blood._ All that grand old faith the king had had back then in the goodness of Heaven and human beings. It’s fading fast. He knows it won’t take much to smudge it out completely.

They sit there a while longer in the cold, tenuous silence—the little red king looking down into his whiskey—every soul trembling in their presence.

War watches the scowl settle on the king’s face the longer he thinks, the longer he looks at the people in the room.

_Just give it a try,_ he says. _Believe me, kiddo. There’s nothing in the world that can beat the way it feels._

A man in the corner lunges over the pool table and grabs a woman by the hair and yanks her back and sinks his teeth into her throat. The scream she lets out cuts short when he tears it out, a mass of flesh in his mouth, and falls back, and the woman’s friend snatches a pool stick from the wall and thrusts it into his eye. Its end comes out the back of his skull and the king hasn’t moved a muscle.

He takes a sip of his drink, staring absently at the bottles behind the bar.

A young man in the back breaks a bottle over his friend’s head and uses the jagged pieces to gouge out his own eyes, and three women, reeling away from him, turn abruptly on each other, clawing out with manicured nails, breaking them off in each other’s flesh, tumbling headlong into a brawl beginning near the tables, friends slamming one another’s heads down onto the edges of chairs, taking their lovers by the teeth and yanking down on their jaws until they pop out of joint, biting one another’s tongues out, beating one another bloody, women stepping on the necks of men with stiletto heels until their jugulars burst, men strangling each other with their bare hands, breaking skulls against the road signs hanging on the walls, and the bartender, whose whiskey has not saved her, being dragged by the hair through the shattered bottles behind the counter, her face slashed to bits by some customer with a steak knife, and the king and his chauffeur sitting on their stools, suits immaculate.

_You’re gonna go far, kid,_ says War, with pride.

* * *

 

**V.**

They take their time.

A month later, in Georgia, where he can still smell the scarlet in the air a hundred-some years back, he teaches the little red king how to take people’s faces away, to blur them all together into the ragged, putrescent mass they are. To make them ants, and all the easier to destroy. It doesn’t take much. The boy has memories planted like graves into most of the towns in this country, and most of them are festering sores that are simple to inflame.

Half of the countryside goes up in flames before they take their leave. The king puts mania in the minds of schoolchildren. Teenagers hurling Molotov cocktails into suburban houses, whooping, hollering, red-eyed and blinded by their own smoke, dragging people out into the streets to douse them in gasoline.

The king learns how to make them attack their own children; learns how to make those children who survive into ticking time-bombs in their turn; learns how to start riots in school courtyards and town squares by simply passing in the midst of the crowd.

War teaches him to kiss. The king kisses men and women as he goes along the street and listens to them, behind him, like tributes in his wake, hurling one another into plate-glass windows or careening off the street to drag them up and under the wheels of their cars.

Chaos is energy and blood is power and he understands that, now. Feels it filling up his body like sacred fire. He’s got it, now.

Word comes on the hot winds that the armies in the West are getting restless.

_Let them wait,_ the king says, wiping blood from his mouth in Kentucky, stepping daintily over a mass of rotting corpses clogging up a street. The hems of his trousers are stained an ugly crimson.

War is only too happy to oblige.

* * *

 

**VI.**

The little red king gets hungry in Michigan. In Detroit, particularly.

The outsides of his irises, War notes, are beginning to turn red, a near-glowing rim that leaches into the tints of gold and hazel. War quips that the red and green make him look like Christmas. The king smiles a wry little smile and a church two streets over collapses on everyone inside.

He gets hungry—every entourage his brother in the West sends him to hurry him on his way ends up dead and drained and twitching on the floor of whatever penthouse suite they’re holding hostage that night. The king gorges himself on blood. War doesn’t like it. Doesn’t like the boy being too dependent on anything, particularly a limited resource like that.

When he offers himself, it’s only casually, but the little red king’s shimmering burnished eyes light up like brass. The first time is tentative. The king has never eaten from a Horseman before. But when War opens a gash in his palm and holds it to the child’s lips the little red king shudders as if from ecstatic pleasure and sucks as hard as he can, teeth scraping the wound, staining his mouth black. War smiles. It’s good.

(The king rides War’s cock that night, too, clawing at his own chest with his sharp, sharp fingernails, drawing blood from his skin, grinding his white teeth into his lower lip and moaning like he’s never known anything like the way War makes him come. That’s better.)

He makes it a ritual; War thinks the king likes rituals. They make him feel sacred when he’s anything but. They snake across the middle states and in the night the king opens the vein of War’s neck and drinks, makes obscene noises in his throat, like a starving feral thing. The more he drinks the more his eyes throb red and the easier it is for him to send whole cities into frenzies, to lean back against War’s chest on the Mustang and watch while skyscrapers topple and the sky turns hazy with smoke and the people slaughter one another.

War doesn’t know what’s happening now in the places they’ve already been. He suspects someone is trying to do something about it. He suspects not even the most organised military force will be able to resist the urge to turn their machine guns on the children in the streets. He smiles against the crown of the king’s head. He’s so proud.

* * *

 

**VII.**

There are angels in Colorado. The king meets one for negotiations of territory. War thinks perhaps they know one another; the angel certainly looks miserable enough, at the sight of the boy.

Of course, there are no negotiations, not really. The whole damn world belongs to the little red king. When they meet—War hovering behind him, wrinkling his nose at the celestial stench—the king says as much.

_Your brothers are taking up space that’s mine,_ says the king. The angel says nothing. Only looks at him with sadness. _It’s mine by right._

_By what right, Sam?_ says the angel. _You’re not a king. Please. You’re only a pawn._

_It’s mine by the law that the world is corrupt,_ says the king, and War has to admit that he’s impressed. That’s one he hasn’t heard before. _It’s mine by default. God left it to burn and I have the fire._

_Sam,_ the angel pleads, _you don’t know what you’re doing. This isn’t right._

_No,_ says the king, _but it feels like it, and that’s good enough._

_Once you wouldn’t have said that. Once you fought and we had faith in you—once you were a good man, Sam._

_I am not a man,_ says the king, _and I am not good. I understand that now._

The king has mercy; the angel walks free. The little red king doesn’t blink anymore.

* * *

 

**VIII.**

War fucks the king on the hood of the Mustang in the desert wastes of Nevada while vultures circle overhead. A mile down the road behind them a town of four hundred people is systematically killing one another. The king gave them the gift of sight and as soon as they saw the scum that they were they turned. Easy as pie. The king is glowing with power, shivering with laughter, furnace-hot beneath War’s hands, grinning like a knife.

In the time it takes for him to come, the town behind them has gone completely silent. Bereft of all life.

They tear on.

* * *

 

**IX.**

Word comes on the hot winds that the armies in the West are tired of waiting.

They meet them on the edge of California, by the sea, a staggering mob, and the little red king can see all their true faces now, War knows. Can see them for the mass of horrors that they are. Demons of all shades, Hellspawn crawled up from the deepest crags. At the front of them all is the king’s brother, his eyes black as pitch, his face a mask of distrust.

The king and his brother embrace while War looks on, and the brother, the general, holds the boy at arm’s length, looking him up and down, looking with his tar-dark eyes into the throbbing red of the king’s.

_You ready?_ he says, with a kind of fervor. _You gonna tear this whole damn world apart, Sammy._

The little red king smiles at his brother. Reaches up to touch his cheek, to lean in close, conspiratorial, intimate, and War knows his job, for now, is done. Here is the final push, the last thing the king needs to be everything War knows he can be. Oh, the unconditional love of a brother.

Beyond them all the sea is red, red, red as blood.

_Where do we start?_ says the king.


End file.
